ERIC EJ1131496: The Effect of Two Types of Feedback on Iranian EFL Learners' Tense-Marker Production

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The Effect of Two Types of Feedback on Iranian EFL Learners'

Tense-marker Produ ction

Somayeh Kazemi Tari

(IslamicAzad University, Qaemshahr Branch, Iran)

doi:10.7575/aiac.alls.v.2n.1p.108
Abstract
Although many researchers have worked on the role of feedback in immersion programs on
second language learners' production, still little is known about the role of different types of
immediate feedback on the grammatical accuracy of learners' production. When, where and
with who different types of immediate feedback such as prompts and recasts and their
different subcategories might be appropriate? The purpose of the present research was to
know which types of immediate oral feedback could better help Iranian EFL learners to
produce the correct form of the tense markers of their target language English. One of the
primary objectives of the present study was to examine the effects of two types of oral
feedback namely explicit correction and implicit or-choice feedback on Iranian EFL
learners' production of different tense markers in English. The results were in favor of explicit
correction over implicit or-choice feedback in helping learners to produce correct
grammatical tense markers.

Introduction
The use of feedback in language teaching is nothing new. Traditional language teachers
immediately corrected their students' errors when they appeared in their utterances. There are
different views regarding the use of different types of feedback. Interlanguage researchers
argue that errors should be tolerated as much as they are the result of the learner's
communicative strategies. Another view is that errors should be ignored on the whole. Still
another view is that some types of errors should be corrected. Ellis (1990) provides taxonomy
of the type of errors that should be corrected by the teacher. According to Ellis (1990, pp. 54-
55), global errors, errors that affect the overall comprehensibility of an utterance, stigmatized
errors, and errors relating to the learner's next stage of development should be corrected.

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There are a number of studies that have elicited teachers' rationales for correcting errors.
Chaudron's (1986, in Chaudron, 1998, p. 136) research is among those. He compared the
corrections made by teachers in French immersion classes in Canada and found that teachers
corrected more "grammatical" (morphological and syntactic) errors in French classes (average
77%) than in other classes (average 37%). Also, Chaudron (1986, in Ellis, 1990, p. 73) found
that fewer discourse errors were corrected compared to morphological errors.

Although the terms "feedback" and "correction" are usually used interchangeably, but Long
(1977, cited in Ellis, 1990, p. 71) suggests the term "feedback" be used for the teacher's
information about the correctness of the learner's utterances, while the term "correction" be
used for the effect of feedback on learning. Ellis (1990, p. 71) uses error treatment and
corrective feedback synonymously and states that the broadest definition of treatment is "any
reaction by the teacher that clearly transforms, disapprovingly refers to or demands
improvement."

Correction may not always be effective; in order for the correction to be effective some
prerequisite must be met. Johnston (1988) states that correction is effective when:
1. The learner desires or needs to eradicate the mistake.
2. She is able to form an internal representation of what the correct behavior looks like.
3. She realizes that her performance is flawed.
4. She has the opportunity to perform in real condition. (cited in Ellis, 1990, p. 181)

Feedback to learners can be either explicit through overt correction or implicit through
negotiation work. Negotiation and interaction are important in L2 learning because as
Mackey and Philp (1998, in Kaplan, 2002, pp. 172-76) have shown interaction can provide
modified speech, confirmation check, comprehension check, clarification request, or-choice,
topic-focused, elaboration, on the spot learning, delayed learning, and testing a hypothesis.
And according to Mitchell and Myles (20
on face to face interaction and shared processes, such as joint problem solving and

There are different types of feedback compiled by Lightbown and Spada (2006), Ellis (1994),
Ellis (2003), and Doughty and Long (2003). Nassaji provides three types of focus of form
feedback: non-negotiated feedback, limited negotiation feedback, and extended negotiation
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feedback (cited in Fotos & Nassaji, 2007, pp. 123-24). Brown (2007, pp. 277-78) has
provided taxonomy of six types of feedback that includes recast, clarification request,
metalinguistic feedback, elicitation, explicit correction, and repetition. Among these six types
of feedback, four types (i.e. clarification request, repetition, metalinguistic clues, and
elicitation) are related to prompts. These four types of prompts have one crucial feature in
common: "They withhold correct forms (and other signs of approval) and instead offer
learners an opportunity to self-repair by generating their own modified response" (Lyster,
2004, p. 405).

Among different types of feedback one type that has had too many contradictory results on
the learners' learning behavior is "recast". Recast is "an implicit type of corrective feedback
that reformulates or responds an ill-formed or incomplete utterance in an unobtrusive way"
(Brown, 2007, p. 277). Lyster (1998, in Kaplan, 2002, p. 177) found that learners could not
decipher whether recasts were signs of correction or approval. Lyster and Ranata (1997, in
Kaplan, 2002, p. 177) also found that recasts did not have immediate effect on subsequent
production. But Mackey and Philp (1998, cited in Kaplan, 2002, p. 177) considering delayed
effects of feedback showed that recasts had positive effect on learners' production.

Comparing the effects of recasts and prompts, Ammar (2008) found superior effects for
prompts over recasts in the acquisition of possessive determiners by Francophone learners of
English as a second language. She also found that prompts were particularly effective for
lower proficiency learners, whereas higher proficiency learners appeared to benefit similarly
from both recasts and prompts. Lyster (2004) explains the four types of prompt used in
French immersion classes mentioned before as follows:

1. Clarification requests

Student: Et le coccinelle . . .
Teacher: Pardon?
Student: La coccinelle . . .

2. Repetitions
to highlight the error. For example:
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Student: La chocolat . . .
Teacher: La chocolat?
Student: Le chocolat

3. Metalinguistic clues provide comments, information, or questions related to the well-

Student: .

Teacher: Pas son carte
Student: Euh, sa carte?

4. Elicitation
allow students to complete

Teacher: Il vit où un animal domestique? Où est-ce que ça vit?

Student: Dans un maison
Teacher: Dans . . . ? Attention
Student: Dans une maison

Finally, Brown (2007, p. 278) classifies responses to feedback into three types: (1) uptake, (2)
repair, and (3) repetition.

Research questions
This study aims to test the effect of two types of feedback (i.e. explicit correction and
elicitation), which are hypothesized to trigger different degrees of cognitive processing and
awareness. The research questions are thus formulated as follows:

1. Will the use of explicit and implicit feedback in class improve Irania
to accurately apply English tense markers?
2. Which type of feedback is more effective explicit correction or implicit or-choice
feedback?
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Research hypotheses
To find answers to the above mentioned questions the following null hypotheses were
formulated:
1. The use of explicit and implicit feedback in class will not improve Iranian EFL

2. Explicit correction feedback is not more effective than or-choice feedback on Iranian
EFL learners' production of tense markers.

Method
Participants
The participants in this study were females EFL students (n = 30) divided into two classes of
15. The students were all beginners. They received feedback on tense markers for 10 sessions.
Each of the two groups received a particular type of feedback. One group, designated as the
explicit correction group (Group A), received explicit correction following their errors in
tense markers, whereas the other group designated as the implicit or-choice group (Group B),
received or-choice feedback following errors in tense markers.

Procedures
Before instructional period, students received a fill-in-the-blank pretest and after the
instruction they received the same test as posttest (see Appendix A). During the ten-session
instructional period, students in the two groups received different types of feedback for 10
sessions. Each session some sentences that included one of the simple present, simple past
and present continuous tenses were extracted from one unit of the Intro book (Richards,
1997) and their structures were practiced by the students. For examples of these structures see
Table 1 below.

Table 1: Structures with simple present, simple past and present continuous tenses
Tense markers Structures
Simple present Wh-questions and statements with be
Simple present Wh-questions and statements
Yes/No and Wh-questions with do
Questions with how
Simple past Wh-questions and statements with be
Simple past Wh-question and statements
Past tense of be
Present continuous Yes/No and Wh-questions and statements

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Then, the researcher asked the students some oral questions to elicit the tense markers that
were practiced on the same session or the sessions before. At the end of each session, the
students were asked to make dialogues about their own experiences using the structures
worked out on the same day and role play it in the class. During the whole class time students'
tense marker errors were immediately corrected in both groups. The explicit correction group
(Group A) received Type A feedback (i.e. explicit error correction) and the implicit or-choice
group (Group B) received Type B feedback (i.e. or-choice feedback). Examples of Type A and
Type B feedbacks for some errors extracted from teacher-student interaction in class are
presented in Table 2.

Table 2: Type A and Type B feedback with some examples extracted from teacher-
student interaction
Feedback Type Example
Type A 1 T: What did you eat for breakfast?
(explicit correction S: I eated tea, bread and butter for breakfast
T: 'I eated tea', no. I drank tea & I ate bread.
2 T: Where does your father work?
S: My father work in bank.
T: Uh uh! 'My father works' not 'my father work'.
3 T: What are you doing?
S: I speak.
T: 'I speak', no. 'I'm speaking'.
Type B 1 T: What is Sara doing now?
(or-choice feedback) S: She listening you now.
T: 'She listening to me' or 'she is listening to me'?
S: She is listening.
2 T: What did you do yesterday?
S: I /ri:d/ my book.
T: Yesterday, 'you /ri:d/ your book' or 'you /red/ your book'?
S: I /red/.
3 T: Did you go to bed late last night?
S: No, I go to bed early.
T: 'You go to be early' or 'you went to bed early'?
S: I went to bed early.

Target features
To select the 3 target tense markers used in this stud
course book and selected the most frequent tense markers appearing in these materials. These
tense markers are presented in Table 3 with a few examples for each.

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Table 3: Tense markers along with a few examples
Tense Markers Examples
Simple present They play football everyday.
She plays the piano.
Simple past I walked home yesterday.
She went to the office.
I read (pronounced /red/) an English book this morning.
Present continuous I am writing a story.
She is smiling.
They are listening to the teacher.

Treatment materials
Ten topics were selected from among the students' course book material. The material, which
included different topics such as greeting, daily schedule, clothes, families, and past
experiences, provided the communicative context for the present study. For the purposes of
this study, the topics for discussing and practicing different grammatical forms in the class
were selected from Intro, an international communication book written by Richards (1997).
The conversations and grammar exercises included in the book provided the context for
study.

Measures
assessed by using a written 20-item
fill-in-the-blank test for which they were given 25 minutes to complete. The same test was
used both as pretest and posttest. By comparing the pretest-posttest results with two t-tests the
effectiveness of each type of feedback was measured. Then another t-test was used to
compare the results of the two posttests to see which feedback was more effective.

Before the introduction of the study, in a pilot study conducted by the researcher, the 20-item
teacher-made test was administered to a group of 15 students at the same level with the
students in the researcher's classes to measure the reliability of the teacher-made test. By
using the Kuder-Richardson formula, the researcher measured the reliability of the test to be
about 0.70. The measured reliability was within an acceptable range.

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Results and discussion
The means and standard deviations of the pretests and posttests of the two groups are shown
in Tables 4 and 5. Also, Figure 1 shows the means of the pretests and posttests for Group A
and Group B.

Table 4: Pretest means (M) and standard deviations (SD) for the two groups
Group A¹ (n=15) Group B² (n=15)
M SD M SD
6.8 2.8 6.4 2.9
¹ Group A: explicit correction group
² Group B: or-choice group

Table 4 shows that the means for the two groups on the pretest have no significant difference:
t= 0.39, p<0.05. This confirms that the two groups were essentially equivalent before the
instruction started. From Figure 1, it is quite evident that the posttest means are significantly
higher than the pretest means: t=6.92, p<0.05 for Group A, and t= 4.30, p<0.05 for Group B.
This shows that both types of feedback (i.e. Group A feedback and Group B feedback)
improved the students' accurate use of tense markers in English.

The means of the two groups on posttest, shown in Table 5 and also evident in Figure 1 show
that the explicit correction group outperformed the or-choice group on the posttest: t=2.12,
p<0.05.

Table 5: Posttest means (M) and standard deviations (SD) for the two groups
Group A¹ (n=15) Group B² (n=15)
M SD M SD
12.3 1.4 10.1 1.8
¹ Group A: explicit correction group
² Group B: or-choice group

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Figure 1: The pretest and posttest means for groups A and B

The results of the t-tests rejected the first and second null hypotheses, thus confirming the
effectiveness of the two types of feedback, and approving the superiority of the Type A
feedback over Type B feedback on Iranian EFL learners' production.

The present study thus contributes to the arguments about the benefit of different types of
corrective feedback by confirming that explicit correction is more beneficial compared to or-
choice feedback to the beginner Iranian EFL learners in communicatively oriented
classrooms. In terms of pedagogical implications, these findings may not be generalizable to
other instructional contexts.

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References
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Ellis, R. (1994). The study of second language acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Ellis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Lyster, R. (2004). Differential effects of prompts and recasts in Form-focused instruction. SSLA, 26, 399 432.
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Appendix A: Pretests and Posttests
Complete these conversations using the correct form of the verb forms in parentheses.
1. A: What _______ (do) you do?
B: I'm a student. I study English.
A: What _______ (do) your mother do?
B: She is a teacher. She _______ (teach) English at a school in Chicago.
A: Is your father a teacher, too?
B: No, he is a doctor. He _______ (work) in a hospital.
2. A: Is your sister looking for a job?
B: Yes, she is. She _______ (work) in a restaurant now, but she _______ (look) for a job in a theater. She
_______ (love) acting.
3. A: _______ (do) you _______ (do) anything special over the weekend?
B: Yes, I _______. I _______ (go) shopping. I _______ (spend) all my money. Now I don't have any money.
4. A: What _______ (do) you _______ (do) last night?
B: I _______ (see) the new Tom Cruise film. I _______ (love) it!
5. A: _______ (be) you in France last summer?
B: Yes, I _______ (be).
A: How long _______ (be) you there?
B: I _______ (stay) there for a month.
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